Have you ever used a word chart before when working with your child? They’re quick and fun to make and they help children with early literacy skills. Our children love to make them and get excited to come up with new ideas for how to contribute. This week, we made a word chart for teaching shapes.
How to Make a Word Chart
Word charts are so easy to make. Our favorite thing to use is a whiteboard on an easel. You could also use a big piece of construction paper, a chalk board, your driveway with sidewalk chalk. Pretty much any large writing surface would work well.
Basically, you decide what type of list you would like to make. If you’re learning about the letter A, perhaps you want to make a list of things that start with the letter A.
Our Word Chart for Teaching Shapes
This week we have been reading our book called Shapes All Around Us. It’s a book about shapes that are found in the world. The book led to a discussion about different shapes the children had seen at home or on trips. From there, the idea of making a Word Chart was born!
The chart we made this week focused on shapes all around us, both inside and outside. We’ve been learning so much about different shapes and their properties. We thought it would be fun to find different shape around us. Our children were so excited to explore all around them to see where they could find different shapes!
We focused on 4 basic shapes: square, circle, triangle, and rectangle. We ended up making two different charts. One for the shapes we found inside and one for outside. We just took a large piece of paper and used the top half for inside and the bottom for outside. Using a large piece of paper made it easier to carry our list outside.
Our Finished Word Chart About Shapes
We had so much fun with this activity! I think searching outside was more fun for them than even searching inside for the shapes. As you can see in our list about, the children found loads of shapes outside! Our Word Chart about Shapes was a great way to work on literacy and math, but we also got in some exercise walking and running to find the shapes. We will definitely be making more word charts in the future!
